#telepaths

You hear and feel everything in everyone else’s heads, all the good and the bad, and humans have a long memory for wounding.

You can choose to focus on the good or the bad. If you’re lucky, you’re able to focus on the good. If not…

Well.

Imagine your ability to trust is damaged, and all you can hear from everyone is the untruths and insincerities everyone trades all day, every day.

You know when people are faking. You know when they’re lying. You know what they’re lying about. You know their meanest thoughts, their worst moments, their deepest hurts, their selfishness, their anger, their hatred. You’re surrounded by it. You can’t escape. You can’t forget.

And you’re just hurt enough to not even want to try.

Crawling out of that would be so hard.

Furthermore! Do you think that they can ‘catch’ mental illnesses the same way that physical illness can be caught?

Like, imagine a Betazoid whose best friend has depression. Obviously they would spend a lot of time in close proximity with this person, and when they’re together obviously the Betazoid is going to be feeling their friend’s emotions!

But eventually they start feeling that way more and more, even when they aren’t together, and initially they think it’s just because their friend is struggling and they’re sad about it. But eventually they feel depressed all the time, and then— congrats! They caught depression!

(Oh that would be horrible, wouldn’t it? Like imagine being the friend who accidentally gave your buddy depression just by being around. That’d just mess with your head even more, wouldn’t it?)

Or like imagine it’s a Jedi around someone with anxiety. They just start spiraling and can’t stop and they don’t know what they’re panicking about! So they’re trying to both release their own emotions into the Force and calm the other person at the same time!

(Ka’ra all it takes is one (1) Jedi with anxiety or OCD or PTSD or something to cripple like. Half the Order. No wonder they care so much about releasing emotions. This is, of course, a joke. No Jedi hate here, please.)

Or like, you’re a superhero like Martian Manhunter or Jean Grey or whoever. Imagine trying to rescue someone from a burning building or a hostage situation or something and you’re just trying to focus but the person you’re trying to save is having a PTSD episode so you’re getting flashes of their prior trauma and… well, you might have secondhand trauma now.

Or maybe the telepath/empath experienced a traumatic event with their whole team or just a bunch of other people in general, so you experience the event in (insert however many) other ways all at the same time. If they’re friends or coworkers or teammates, or just people you have to deal with semi-regularly, you have to contend with not only your own memories of the event but also the others’ trauma responses as well.